February 5, 2012

Adwords Express looks like a safe bet for small business.

July 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Some time ago I wrote about my frustrations with AdWords resellers and the crazy CPC mark-ups, poor results and resulting High churn rate in the local space.

The economics and the business model are a challenge. Resellers have to pay sales teams who have to sign up as many advertisers as possible and account managers (if the business has any) have 100′s or 1000′s of accounts to look after.  The reseller than has to slap on a massively high mark-up on the Cost per click to drive any revenue at all.

I’ve seen 100% mark-ups ‘out in the wild’.

It’s a low quality, high volume business. and yes, the churn rate is massive because advertisers are not happy with results or service.

Honestly, It’s not a business model I’d touch with a 10 foot pole!

What I have begun to do is share my knowledge on this blog (via the ‘Mind your own PPC’ posts) in the hope that small business readers can start to wrestle control of their marketing back from dodgy resellers and actually get some value for money. Eg don’t pay a 100% mark-up on Click costs if you don’t have to.

 

However the reality of the situation is that many small business owners simply do not have the time (even a few minutes a day) to devote to managing their own local search campaign, nor the time to devote to learning what they need to learn to get things going properly.  Yet they also know that that they are potentially missing out on valuable traffic by not having a presence in the search results or map pages.  So they’re forced to find a supplier who can get them there, even if it means paying more than they should for mediocre campaigns…

Enter Google AdWords Express

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Filed Under: AdWords 101, Local Search Marketing, Mind Your Own Pay-Per-Click Tagged With: , ,

What most Agencies never ask new AdWords advertisers.

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

But probably should ask…

Do you have your web site ready for PAID traffic?

It’s very easy to get carried away at the thought of instant traffic to your site in the form of AdWords clicks. But if that site of yours is not ready for traffic, then you’re just wasting your time and money.

I’m not talking about conversion optimisation here – all these things follow later. I’m talking about giving your business the best possible chance of generating ROI from your ad spend, and forming some kind of relationship with the user that just clicked through. Conversions that matter are not always transactional in the form of money in the bank and a product sold. They can often be as simple as an email sign-up or a ‘White Paper’ download.  Building a relationship with the researchers and the information hunters is just as important as converting those ready to buy.

The idea here, in simple terms,  is that even if this user (who’s click you just paid for on AdWords) does not purchase from you on their first visit, if you get your ‘hooks’ into them somehow, then you may be able to get them back to your site for free the next time when they are ready to buy.

Here’s a list of things I’d consider:

  • Email sign-up form (even if you don’t send out emails yet)
  • Facebook Fan/Business Page and a ‘Like’ box on your site. (yes, simple as that. They’re free, 500 million ++ people might see it… so go get one).
  • A Contact Us form that works… (You know who you are, the site with the broken contact form that emails no one, or the incorrect email address listed.)
  • Follow Us on Twitter link. (If you are on Twitter make sure you let people follow you easily).
  • Local business?  Phone number and even your address on every page!

OK that’s just a few ideas for now.

The other question to continue to ask yourself even while you are paying for traffic is:

Are you also doing everything you can to build a consistent and reliable source of ‘free’* traffic?

* nothing’s ever free… in the case of free web traffic I refer to that which you have not had to purchase it via amedia buy. Eg.  SEO  versus PPC (SEO you pay for on-site dev, and off-site factors, not the actual click from the search engine).

Filed Under: AdWords 101, Online Marketing Tagged With: , ,

It’s a ‘Google Promotion’! Google’s Adwords House Ads have a new name.

September 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

I was just doing some research and noticed this in the top adwords spot.

A sponsored link for webmaster tools.

Is this new? I’ve not seen it before,  and I don’t recall ever seeing the disclaimer ‘Google promotion‘  instead of ‘Sponsored links’..

Interesting!

google-adwords-google-promotion-sponsored-links2

Perhaps Google have finally given in to pressure… But I am still seeing them buy ‘sponsored links’ for other terms.

Filed Under: Random Stuff, Search News Tagged With: , ,

AdWords Displayed URL is Too Long

July 5, 2010 By 6 Comments

I came across this post over at at WebmasterWorld and It made me laugh.

Question:

Unfortunately the displayed URL is too long.
I skipped the www. , but it is still one letter too long. Asking for an exception was rejected without any further hint, how to make it work.
Any suggestion?

Answer:

Get a shorter domain.

If you don’t know already, AdWords allows 35 characters in the display URL field.

eg.

get-a-really-long-spammy-domain.com -> count = 35 Chars.

Honestly, there’s NEVER a good reason to have a domain name this long anyway. AdWords display URL limits are the least of your problems dude.

Additionally, if you are trying to stuff keywords into a hyphenated domain name so that you can try and rip off people with weight loss re-bill offers, Google won’t take long to bring down the ban hammer.

A word from the wise.

  • Long domains suck.
  • Keep your domain short regardless of where you’re advertising. You want people to remember it after all.
  • Hyphens in domains suck.
  • If you really need a hyphen – keep the domain short.

Happy AdWor’tising!

Filed Under: AdWords 101 Tagged With: ,

It Seems Landing Page Quality Score Does Not Matter When you are Google

May 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

I searched for ‘adwords credits for non profits’  on google.com.au

SERP

Awesome: ‘Google Grants is now available to AU non Profits…’

Picture 157

I click on the ad…

404!

Picture 158

Fail!

Filed Under: AdWords 101, Random Stuff Tagged With: , ,

Are You Making These 7 Google AdWords Mistakes? (Mistake #1)

March 2, 2010 By 12 Comments

Series: 7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.AdWords mistakes

Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.

I see this mistake all the time and, as a new AdWords advertiser, it’s not exactly 100% your fault. I’ll explain why.

Google (and Yahoo and MSN) pretty much lead you down a path of adding way to many keywords per ad group right from the account set-up stage when they ask you to add your keywords. How many of you had a list of 100 or so and just added them into one ad group to get going? See what I’m getting at?

Well I’m here to tell you that it most definitely is a big mistake, but it is understandable given the way the account set-up process works.

While there is no single correct answer when it comes to the number of keywords per group, the aim of the game is simple – each ad group should only contain highly targeted, related keywords that focus on a specific product or service.

Take a look back at all your ad groups and ask yourself, “Are these groups individually targeting a single product, service, or action?” If not then you have some work to do.

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Filed Under: AdWords 101, Mind Your Own Pay-Per-Click Tagged With: , , ,

Google Content Network – Strategy Cheat Sheet

November 3, 2009 By 8 Comments

Disclaimer:  I received this one-sheeter from Google last week. While I don’t yet have any hard data to support networkthese strategy recommendations, they’re definitely worth considering.

Google Content Network Strategy

Invest Time Upfront

-    Set up your campaign correctly from the start

  • Choose the right targeting option to meet your campaign goals. Use contextual targeting with keywords grouped by theme to achieve direct response goals and use placement targeting to reach domains and pages for branding goals.
  • Divide and conquer – Manage search and content campaigns separately to customize content keywords, placements, bids, and budgets. This will give you the flexibility to test different content strategies without affecting the performance of your search campaigns and will tighten control over your content network spending.
  • Measure and track conversions – Set up Google conversion tracking before running a content campaign. With conversion tracking, you will be able to see your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for each ad group and placement to better inform your optimization decisions.

Guide Your Consumer

-    Make it easy for people to respond to your offer

  • Drive action with compelling ads. Attract potential customers to your ad by highlighting unique selling points and promotions with engaging, descriptive messaging. Include call-to-action phrases in your ad to reference a desired action post-click.
  • Match destination URLs to what’s being advertised in your ad. Create a seamless experience and keep potential customers engaged by linking your ad to customized landing pages that load in less than one second, or even faster.
  • Remove distractions and pave the way for conversions. Provide an easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad. Make it visible on the landing page by placing your call-to-action button on the top half of the page, above the fold.

Track, Tune and Prune

-    Manage your campaign closely as it ramps up, then put it on auto-pilot

  • Evaluate performance at the placement level. See where your ads are showing in the Networks tab in your account or with a Placement Performance Report (PPR) and spend more time evaluating sites that make up 80% of your spend.
  • Extend your reach by replicating success. Get more of what’s working by noting where your ads are performing well and creating similar ad groups and related placements to reach additional high potential areas of the content network.
  • Refine ad groups to improve ROI. Fix what’s not working by decreasing bids on poor performing placements, excluding undesired placements, and adding negative keywords to refine targeting.
  • Auto-optimize with Conversion Optimizer. Another benefit to implementing Google’s conversion tracking is Conversion Optimizer. . Turn on Google’s Conversion Optimizer and select a maximum CPA and Conversion Optimizer will automatically manage all of your bids to drive the most conversions at an average cost below that CPA.
Filed Under: AdWords 101, Google Content Network, Online Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

The Google Content Network: The Biggest Ad Network in the World.

October 19, 2009 By 3 Comments

ad-networksI’m not kidding – Google’s Content Network reaches more than 80% of global Internet users, and serves over 6 Billion Ad impressions a day! Are you getting your fair share of those impressions?

I’m a big fan of the Content Network from an advertiser perspective for many reasons. While a big factor for me is ease of use, every day I am blown away by the sheer power and potential of a network that has such a massive online reach.  It’s just mind blowing.

I’ve posted before about Optimizing for the Google Content Network, and the truth be told, up until now everyone, including Google,  seem to have very different suggestions on content network optimization strategies in general.

However,  I read Josh Dreller’s article over at Search Engine Land last week and was impressed with the level of information he’s provided. Check it out if you have not already – ‘Why You Can’t Ignore The Google Content Network – AdSense Q&A’. It’s an  interview Jasper Seldin, Content Optimization Specialist at Google.

I’m not going to re-hash the whole article here as that would be pointless, but I did want to highlight one paragraph that I think holds the key (although somewhat cryptic in parts) to success on the Content Network…

The question put to Jasper was “We all know by now that Content Targeting extrapolates the idea of your ad group via the keywords and then matches it with a theme and runs on those sites. Can you go into more detail about this process?”

Jasper: Google performs page analysis on every page in the content network. First, we scan the page and pick out words we think are most relevant to the content on the page. We can tell headlines from footers and can pick up on words that repeat often or are emphasized with bolding or italics. Together, these words create concepts. Concepts tell us the unique meaning of each page. There aren’t a finite number of concepts, unless you count the number of words that convey unique meaning.

And of course, we look at related concepts and see how they roll up into entire categories. It’s these concepts and categories that you are ultimately targeting with your keyword list. When you select keywords, we analyze the theme of the keyword list and place you on pages where the themes and categories match. An ad group can target multiple themes, but we recommend only targeting one theme with each ad group to ensure that you are putting the right message in front of the right user.

Really very interesting…

  • On the content Network you are targeting ‘concepts’ and ‘categories’ not keywords, pages, or sites (unless you’re doing placement targeting…).
  • Google scan all pages on the network and pick out the words they believe are most relevant on a page and tie them together as concepts.
  • They then look at how concepts are related, and tie them up into categories.
  • The Keywords you select in your AdWords campaign are then themed by Google and your ads are placed on pages where your theme matches the category or concept.

And the most important piece of information of all…

  • If your Ad Group targets more than one theme, chances are Google are not able to effectively match it to the right category on the network. So while your ad group could target more than one theme.  Don’t!

One of the best content targeted Ad Groups I’ve ever run had, wait for it…, one keyword, and one ad.

Theme? Tick!
Concept and category matched by Google? Yes!

Now I’m not saying that only one keyword per ad group will work every time,  but If you only need one keyword to establish your theme, then job done!

Filed Under: Google Content Network Tagged With: , ,

Landing Page Design and the 7 Deadly Sins

July 15, 2009 By 3 Comments

7-deadly-sinsThe ‘Inside Adwords’ Blog posted a great video today on the 7 deadly sins of landing page design, a webinar presented by Tim Ash.

Now there was quite a bit of shameless ‘That information is in my book’ self promotion during question time (Good luck to you Tim!) but the content was really solid.

I liked the fact that Tim takes people though how to actually fix these common mistakes, and I can guarantee that we’ve all been guilty, maybe not directly, of committing one of these deadly sins.

I touched on the importance of landing pages in an article on dennis-yu.com and I reiterate again, that the landing page represents one of your best opportunities to turn those PPC visitors into customers.

Get it right and you engage with your visitors, get it wrong and 99% will click the back button without a second thought.

I hope you enjoy the video and learn a thing or two as well.

Filed Under: Landing Page Optimization Tagged With: , , ,

Adwords Conversions – Difference Between “1-per-click” and “many-per-click”?

May 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

OK. I am getting quite a few  questions of late from people who seem a little confused by Google’s new conversion reporting in AdWords.  More specifically, they want to know:  “Which one do I use?”

The answer to that is, “It depends!”

AArrgghhh! Which One Do I care About?!

AArrgghhh! Which One Do I care About?!

Let me tell you a little story and break it down a bit…

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Filed Under: Google AdWords, PPC Tracking Tagged With: , ,